Category Archives: Scotland

We don’t Need no Thought Control

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Jack manages to get his Wednesday guest post up here on a Wednesday –

There’s a meme going around Facebook just now about the trade-off between corporate life and a happy life that starts with a quote from the Dalai Lama about suits and ties and it got me thinking –

I started my working life as, first an apprentice house and sign painter and decorative painter, and then wound up running my own business doing that. So fairly laid back and relaxed although always at the demands of clients and customers. Eventually I graduated to teaching these skills in the local community college.

That was when my suit and tie days began and so it continued until I retired in 2002. Even after that as a training and education consultant I continued for a number of years to work ‘business hours’ and still in a suit and tie.

It’s very tempting, of course, to buy into the notion of a regular day job existence ‘stealing’ your independence and freedom but I don’t really agree with that I’m afraid. All the time I was attending to customers’ needs and running a college department I had an escape hatch into the world of traditional folk music. So there was a parallel world that I could inhabit whenever I wanted to.

What this meant was that when I finally did retire I had a number of different pensions that kicked in as well as a substantial ‘lump sum’, and I still had the parallel world. That really did give me independence and freedom and I think that’s a perfectly good trade-off. Mind you, I was brought up in the cradle of ‘the protestant work ethic’ so maybe I’m programed in that direction.

It’s possible, I’m sure, to live a satisfying life without the need for a 9 to 5 job that involves a suit and tie and it may be that the US is a country where that is more practicable. I have no doubt there are particular corporate world jobs that provide little satisfaction and are even grindingly boring. So maybe I was just lucky. I certainly always used to describe myself to my favorite college boss as a ‘lucky painter’, although she eventually got tired of me saying that!

All I can say in conclusion is that I have no problem whatsoever with my particular trade-off. But I rarely wear a suit and tie these days – –

Plus ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose

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Jack gets to write on a Friday for a change –

Being a fairly laid back and ‘see the other’s point of view’ kind of guy, I tried very hard not to start anything on Facebook after the latest school shooting. But I was so utterly devastated by the stupid absurdity of the act itself, followed by the inevitable and immediate split between pro and anti-gun voices, that I felt it necessary to take a step back and try to give my point of view.

I really want to understand US gun attitudes across the spectrum but I may have to ‘unfriend’ an awful lot of people that I never thought I would. I can’t understand why folk can’t see what’s staring them in the face, but – hey – I’ve only been a Citizen for eight years and it’s not like you have to pass a test to prove you understand the constitution – – -like I did to become a Citizen.

I’m usually extremely careful about the things I post online, because I do have friends across the whole political continuum. But yesterday’s events just shook me to the core. To be clear, I’m a Quaker, a member of The Religious Society of Friends. I’m a member by convincement and not by birth and have been for 14 years. I am completely opposed to violence and armaments of any kind. I do not own a gun and never will! I can just, but only just, understand the need for a gun to perhaps hunt for food, although I’m close to vegetarian. (Curse my inability to withstand the temptations of bacon.)

All of the above is simply to make folk aware of where I stand. I’m not perfect by any means and certainly not by comparison with others of many faiths and none. But on guns I am very clear where I stand.

Those three paragraphs above are modified from Facebook posts I made yesterday.  What happened after I posted them surprised me. Two longstanding friends went to great lengths to defend the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. One took a constitutional and historical point of view (for which I have some, but limited, sympathy) and the other did the usual “vehicles and knives kill people but you don’t ban them” polemic. What disappointed me about both these responses was that both seemed to think the answer was to increase the number of guns in circulation.

Scotland had its own school shooting in the 1990s: Dunblane primary school, with 16 small children and their teacher killed. That resulted in an almost complete ban on handguns with equally almost complete support from the population, and there have been no school shootings since. Do you understand that? None. I find it incomprehensible that the United States government did not take similar action.

A friend of ours, a journalist we respect, who studies social trends, says that when the Sandy Hook school shooting took place, it was the tipping point. Once children could be killed by gun violence without laws passed in response, the numbing effect of this would permeate and prevent future advocacy.

I think she was right. I wish she hadn’t been.

dunblane

16 of these Dunblane children and their teacher were killed. No school shootings since.